With transformation and incremental evolution of current OSS systems, the CSP’s digital business can realize digital business benefits faster
It is well acknowledged that digitization of services and networks reduces capex as well as overall cost of operation and allows launching services that are tuned to the customer needs. The future digital network, a multi-layer composite of NFV/SDN, IoT and 5G, will be technically equipped to meet the digital service demands of customers over the next 10 years. In this period, in order to make the digital business successful, OSS will play an instrumental role in supporting the required dynamicity, speed and scale of the digital networks and services.
With the introduction of new OSS technologies and functionalities in incremental steps, the OSS of today can be evolved to become future-ready. Some of these steps include the use of REST APIs for integration of OSS layers, use of big data databases and storage, service-oriented and cloud-based architecture, analytics and automation using machine learning.
For this essential digital business transformation, Ovum has identified the CSP’s top 5 digital transformational priorities as:
- Adopting cloud delivery model
- Applying big data analytics to business process
- Transitioning to a digital operating mode
- Moving to a virtualized environment
- Personalizing marketing and care
These business priorities are already driving CSPs to assign top priority to the OSS functions of network optimization, database consolidation and service assurance over the next 18 months.
Within the service assurance space, clear business benefits can be reaped by uplifting OSS to support the digital capabilities which enable higher speed of service rollout, rapid change of service and contextualization of services. The use of proactive digital service quality management and predictive customer analytics have a key role to play in ensuring this:
- Digital service quality management with QoS-driven orchestration plays an important role in managing the customer expectations from digital services in near real-time. Proactivity reduces customer impact and customer churn-out
- Predictive analytics help better planning of network resources, reduction of capex and reduction of opex by revenue-linked operational prioritization. Additionally, predicting customer behavior helps providing personalization of digital services, which allow creation of new revenue streams.
In OSS systems, the use of analytics and automation for network monetization helps large CSPs to discover and use untapped capacity in their networks. It enables the CSP to direct services to those parts of the network that are underutilized. Alternatively, capacity can be dynamically moved to areas of network where it will be utilized better. OSS also has a vital role to play in removing, reducing or re-organizing capacity bottlenecks in the network, helping the operator save capex.
It goes without saying that, by extending OSS analytics to BSS and by computing varied data from multiple sources, the CSP can reap huge technical and commercial benefits.
Finally, using OSS as a tool for digitization works across all markets and geographies, as the following use cases for revenue enhancement or cost optimization suit all CSP sizes:
- Infrastructure savings through network monetization and flexible capacity management
- High availability and reliability, which are key requirements for monetizing digital services (e.g. IoT)
- Agile service launches to reduce opex and prevent customer churn
- Personalized response to customer need to generate new revenue streams
- Flexible SLA and Partner management to derive business benefits of the digital ecosystem
By incorporating the first few technology updates, based on the above use-cases relevant to digital business, current OSS systems can quickly deliver the business benefits to the digital service provider.
